Thursday, August 23, 2018

In recent months, President Trump has
imposed much-needed tariffs to address China’s 24-year trade war and commercial
espionage campaign targeting America. Instead of changing course, China has
imposed tariffs on fairly-traded goods from the United States. While President
Trump’s moves are aimed at helping U.S. manufacturers, we need additional
strategies to help farmers and ranchers. America’s manufacturers and farmers
happen to share a major export problem - an overvalued U.S. dollar that makes
their goods more expensive overseas. If Congress and the administration can
buckle down to pass legislation addressing this “strong dollar,” we could see
corn, soybean and beef prices increase by 25 percent or more.[more...]

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Earlier this week, the Coalition for a Prosperous America
(CPA) published details
of its new ‘Tariff Job Creation Tracker’ that tallied U.S. manufacturing jobs
gained in the wake of recent tariff actions. We keep hearing stories about the
sky falling because of President Trump’s strong hand in enforcing existing U.S.
trade laws. But the past six months have shown impressive job creation in
skilled, high-wage sectors against only very negligible, accompanying job
losses. The early returns show strong positive job creation. And there will
undoubtedly be greater job growth as more sectors receive attention from the
administration.[more...]

During
the Great Depression, farm subsidies were created to keep the family farm
afloat and ensure a stable national food supply. Today, these subsidies have
grown so lucrative that wealthy investors, large corporations, and farm-estate
heirs use taxpayer money to maximize their personal return on investment. Since
2008, however, the top 10 farm subsidy recipients each received an average of
$18.2 million – that’s $1.8 million annually, $150,000 per month, or $35,000 a
week. With the median household income of $60,000 a year, these farmers
received more than 30 times the average yearly income of U.S. families. It was
never the intent of Congress to create a new class of millionaires through
federal farm subsidies. Yet, the subsidies continue to flow. [more...]

Friday, August 17, 2018

As of today, job gains
exceed job losses by a 20:1 ratio. This week we’re showing gains of 11,100 jobs
in four major sectors affected by tariffs. Tariffs are creating far more jobs
than they are sacrificing. The tariffs are working. So far, we have
identified 514 job losses specifically due to tariffs. All job gains and job
losses refer to job changes that have either happened or have been publicly
announced as planned to happen by the companies involved, with specific numbers
included. We have not estimated any of these numbers; they all come from the
companies concerned. We do not include threats of potential job losses, such as
the threat of sacrificing an alleged 4,000 future jobs recently made by the CEO
of Chinese-owned Volvo Cars. Many corporate leaders are making vague threats or
forecasts with clear political motivations. We are going deeper and looking at
facts and facts only. [more...]

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

2018
has been a great year thus far for M&A. The number of deals is down, but
the deal sizes are increasing. Record-breaking deals are being proposed and
executed both in the United States and globally. Just in the last week, Sprint
and T-Mobile announced a $26 billion merger, and Marathon Petroleum announced a
$36 billion acquisition. Other potential deals include Walmart and J Sainsbury,
Walmart (or Amazon) and Flipkart, and Bayer and Monsanto. To provide a better
idea, as of mid-last week, there have been 11,828 deals valued at $1.71
trillion globally. Deals are valued to be 63% larger on average than last year.
[more...]

Monday, April 23, 2018

The
two American giants’ fight for Indian territory has started to intensify.
Amazon and Walmart have been competing to acquire majority stake in India’s
largest e-commerce company, Flipkart. Recent developments suggest Walmart has
proposed a $10-12 billion offer for a 51% stake; the deal could close by the
end of June. On the other hand, Amazon has marked its presence by attaching a
breakup fee of up to $2 billion. A breakup fee is a penalty established in the
deal process that requires payment if the purchaser or seller backs out. In
this case, Amazon will pay a hefty fee if the deal is incomplete for whatever
reason. Nonetheless, the deal structures emphasize the seriousness of both
parties. [more...]

In the Great Class War between the “rich” and the
government, whose side are you on? This week MarketWatch reported that
by 2030, “the richest 1%” are on track to “control nearly 66% of the world’s
money.” This is approximately $305 trillion, it reported, based on data from
the hard-left British newspaper The Guardian, best-selling French
Marxist economist Thomas Piketty, and other sources with comradely views. The
activist group Oxfam warns that “just eight billionaires have as much wealth as
3.6 billion people – the poorest half of the world.” [more...]

Monday, March 19, 2018

I’m
no proponent of runaway government spending and the headlong rush into national
insolvency. But, if the government is going to do it anyway, we as citizens
should get to hold onto every last red cent, regardless what it might
eventually be worth. And, who knows, perhaps the added attention to the deficit
will help the Congress to return to fiscal sanity. It’s doubtful, but we always hope for change we can all
believe in. Like clockwork, President Trump raised the prospect of
more tax cuts during the Republican Congressional Retreat. He recently
delivered, promising Phase 2. [more...]

The
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the employment report for February
2018. It surpassed and surprised analysts’ estimates by adding 313,000 jobs.
The unemployment rate remained at 4.1% for the fifth consecutive month, the
lowest rate in 17 years. Analysts had expected that the U.S. had added about
200,000 jobs and that the pool of potential workers has been depleting. These
new figures suggest otherwise; the last time the U.S. experienced large gains
with low unemployment was during the economic boom of the 1990s. The U.S. has
added over 500,000 new jobs since the start of 2018, and the labor force
participation rate has increased as well - its best one month gain in over 8
years. [more...]

Monday, February 26, 2018

How
could Facebook regain public and political support? Here’s a simple proposal:
the company is investing $14 billion this year on capital spending. That’s a
huge sum of money (and double its 2017 spend). The vast majority of it goes on
the data centers Facebook is building in the U.S. and worldwide. And the vast
majority of that money goes to the servers, storage, and networking gear
crammed, floor to ceiling, into those data centers. Today, virtually all that
money is going to Asian-manufactured IT equipment, simply because all that
equipment is manufactured over there and almost none of it here. What if
Facebook said it would spend a quarter of its data center budget on U.S.-manufactured
equipment? If Facebook committed to spend one quarter of its IT budget on U.S.-made
product, and was followed by other Internet giants, the U.S. might soon have
some 3 million people working on manufacturing the products that make the
Internet hum. [more...]

This
wasn’t supposed to happen. As this article is written, Bitcoin is trading
around $11,200. It’s up from breaking the $6,000 barrier, but this could well
be a dead cat bounce. That’s down from nearly $20,000 in mid-December. After
all, everyone knows that Bitcoin only goes up.... just like the stock market
and housing prices. What gives? What’s happened in cryptocurrencies was
completely predictable. In fact, I wrote an article about this very scenario
back on December 25, 2017. Bitcoin and all of its Johnny-come-lately followers
are in for some more tough times ahead. If it retraces 80-90 percent of its
gains the past year, that will put it in a range of $3,800-5,600. Such a
pullback would not be out of the realm of experience. When a bubble pops, it’s
look out below. [more...]

The truth is that the average entrepreneur is nearly 40
years old. There are more Baby Boomers (ages 53 to 71) starting businesses than millennials (ages 20 to 36) and even more entrepreneurs in Generation X (ages
37 to 52). What’s more, your odds of starting a company that experiences scale
growth, becoming really profitable, only increase with age. The “Mozart Myth”
leads us to believe that if you haven’t started your first company in your
twenties then you’re never going to be an entrepreneur. But age, financial
security, and experience — most often at an established company — are far more
likely predictors of an entrepreneurial career. It turns out that corporations
are often far more effective in training entrepreneurs than are most business
schools or incubators.[more...]

Thursday, February 8, 2018

We
all know today’s script for entrepreneurial success: A super-bright college
student, impatient with classwork, drops out to pursue his big idea.
Venture-capital funders chase after him, and he gathers smart pals around him
to launch his startup.

Sensational
growth soon follows for the company - and riches for its founders - and the
youth-driven innovation economy notches yet another success. It’s a powerful
narrative, and it has shaped lots of thinking about how to spark economic
growth and prosperity. [more...]

In his new book, BURN THE BUSINESS PLAN: What
Great Entrepreneurs Really Do, bestselling author and economist,
Carl Schramm,
applies his decades of experience in the world of entrepreneurship
to offer a myth-busting guide packed with tools and techniques to launch any
business. Illustrated with stories of real entrepreneurs who started successful
businesses, he debunks some of the most commonly held beliefs surrounding
startups and business development - starting with the supposed importance of a
business plan.

Monday, January 29, 2018

For too long, America has been led by a naive embrace of
free trade that overlooks the predatory behavior of our trade competitors.
Widespread trade cheating and poorly designed trade deals have led to
persistent U.S. trade deficits causing job losses, manufacturing decline and
income stagnation. Many nations push their currency values lower, and the
dollar higher, to gain a price advantage in global market at our expense. Their
governments subsidize manufacturing in order to “dump” product in the U.S. market
at below cost. These predatory practices violate world trade law and destroy
American industries. Thankfully, President Trump appears willing to confront
such abuses by punishing trade violators and renegotiating job-killing trade
agreements. [more...]

Monday, January 8, 2018

Withdrawal
from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is likely to boost stock
prices, employment and economic growth. Republican Senators told the White
House earlier this week that NAFTA withdrawal will harm the stock market. But
that claim is based on outdated, incorrect views on trade and investment. America’s
economy and wages grew faster before the modern trade agreement era. But our
manufacturing members saw substantial growth last year in part because of trade
agreement uncertainty and a new focus from business on finding sources of
supply within the U.S. The new approach is raising production and employment at
U.S. manufacturers. Their biggest problem now has become finding skilled workers
to meet new demand. [more...]

Monday, January 1, 2018

I predict, in the January 2018 issue of Real Money Perspectives, many
factors may devastate the American economy in the New Year. Most of Europe’s
nations are being dissolved into the new empire of the European Union, in which
national borders no longer control immigration or trade. As I explained in Money,
Morality & The Machine, this “Superstate,” as founder Jean
Monnet envisioned it, was to be created piecemeal, by deception, with Europeans
denied a democratic vote on whether to undo their national identity. The EU
would be - and now is - run by an elite of unelected progressive Eurocrats.[more...] [Read Part I here...]